The notion of salience in the discourse analysis models how the activation of referred objects evolves in the flow of text. The salience algorithm was defined and tested briefly in an earlier research, we present a reproduction of its results in a larger scale using data from the Prague Discourse Treebank 1.0. The results are then collected into an accessible shape and analyzed both in their visual and quantitative form in the context of the two main resources of the salience - coreference relations and topic-focus articulation. Finally, attempts are made with using the salience information in the machine learning NLP tasks of document clustering and topic modeling. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

The notion of salience in the discourse analysis models how the activation of referred objects evolves in the flow of text. The salience algorithm was already defined and tested briefly in an earlier research, we present a reproduction of its results in a larger scale using data from the Prague Discourse Treebank 1.0. The results are then collected into an accessible shape and analyzed both in their visual and quantitative form in the context of the two main resources of the salience - coreference relations and topic-focus articulation. Finally, attempts are made with using the salience information in the machine learning NLP tasks of document clustering and topic modeling. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Thesis advisor: Hideo Konishi / Thesis advisor: Alberto Alesina / This dissertation studies the interaction of politicians’ and voters’ incentives and its effect on redistributive and immigration policies. The first chapter ``Redistribution, Polarization, and Ideology'' focuses on the effect of income inequality and party polarization on redistributive policy, both theoretically and empirically. I demonstrate that income inequality and party polarization on social issues push redistributive policy in opposite directions. In particular, when the importance of ideology for the voters rises with their income, polarization discourages redistribution. Using data from the American National Election Study and the Census, I verify that it is indeed the case that the importance attached to ideological issues is increasing in the voters' income. Effects of ``income elastic'' ideology can account for the observed stability of redistribution policy in the U.S. The second chapter, ``Foreign Born U.S. Citizens and Immigration Policy'', studies the impact of immigration on immigration reforms, and decomposes the effects of naturalized and non-naturalized immigrants. Using Census data and roll call votes for the House on 2005 and 2006 immigration bills, we find that immigration affects Democratic and Republican parties differently. While the effect of non-naturalized immigrants can be explained by congressional district's socio-economic characteristics, naturalized immigrants exert an additional effect linked to their ability to vote in congressional elections. Higher naturalized immigrant population increases the probability that Democrats vote in favor of immigration, and decreases it for Republicans, suggesting opposite electoral incentives for the two parties, that can be interpreted in a framework of rational office-motivated incumbents seeking reelection. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

The thesis contains a discussion of surrealism and the work of Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington. In the thesis I also distinguish three groups of paintings in essays and describe my work and the way in which theory and practice have recommended one another. 'Salience and Surrealism' discusses how the features of collaboration, play and partnership involve women artists within the surrealist movement, and how their ideas of the feminine principle evolve and change. I also discuss the changing attitudes to imagination, creative inspiration and activity, and the understanding brought about by the meeting between surrealism and psychology. The salience of surrealism as an introverted urge and instinct toward individuation, is suggested by Kenneth Wack 'as the source of surrealism's most abiding success.' The contemporary use of salience applies to features, characteristics, and from architecture as protrusions or fortifications. The dictionary definition begins with extroverted examples like dancig, leaping about and jetting forth. The archaic meaning is origin or first beginning, hence in old medicine salience applies to the heart when it first shows in the embryo. In salience the anagram of, a silence, gave heed to the atmosphere of silence from creativity and in paintings. A silence, also corresponds with the middle part of Meret Oppenheim's life when she experienced an artisitc crisis and depression. This essay looks back fifty years of self-expression from this artist and finds prominent features to suggest the essential dichotomies which mark the artwork. Meret Oppenheim's ouevre includes painting, sculpture, poetry, books, and theatre costume and apparal. Her multiple talents in the arts and literature are like those of Leonora Carrington who has published several books and plays, in the visual arts she sculpted and painted. The salience of their creative and intellectual endeavours found realisation in the wisdom of the feminine, of animal spirits and of natural worlds. The principles of alchemy also inspired and informed their attitudes to creativity which emerges from the unification of opposites. Both artists called for a new alliance between male and female principles, and evolve concepts of androgyny, which for them lift creation to higher levels. These women as artists found a field of the arts that furnished them with both physical life and spiritual life / Master of Arts (Hons)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the opinions of African American college students as they relate to suicide. A questionnaire was distributed to 92 individuals in a computer classroom setting. Their responses were then analyzed to investigate whether ethnic identity salience influenced the students’ perspectives of suicide. Regression analysis revealed that ethnic identity salience did not influence acceptability and normality of suicide in the African American students. Analysis also demonstrated that ethnic identity salience did not effect whether the African American students viewed suicide as being related to mental or moral illness. Seventeen of those who took the questionnaire also participated in interviews. The interviews allowed the respondents to voice their opinions on suicide in the African American community. Nine key themes were discovered during the interviews. Suggestions for suicide prevention and interventions that are more effective, and the directions for future literature on the subject, are discussed.

The focus of this thesis is to explore the impact of positive affective state and mood salience on intertemporal decision making. We found that positive affect significantly influence intertemporal preference. We also found that when current mood becomes salient to the decision maker, the direction of preference changes. Specifically, we hypothesized and found that individuals with positive mood are more likely to choose the later larger (long term) rewards than the individuals with a neutral mood. We discuss three factors that could explain choice behaviour in such situations. These factors are the willingness to maintain positive mood, temporal orientation and risk perception, and increase in the level of dopamine in brain. Moreover, our results indicate that when current positive mood is salient, individuals become more concerned about their affective state, and are more likely to engage in affect regulation, and as a result, more likely to prefer the sooner smaller (immediate) rewards. These findings suggest that experiencing positive affect would increase patience and self-control. However, this is the case when the level of mood salience is not high. When individuals’ attention is directed to their emotional states, they tend to choose sooner smaller rewards that could assist them in keeping their good mood and avoiding negative feelings.

<p>Negotiating the complex decisions that we encounter daily requires coordinated neu- </p><p>ronal activity. The enormous variety of decisions we make, the intrinsic complexity </p><p>of the situations we encounter, and the extraordinary flexibility of our behaviors </p><p>suggest the existence of intricate neural mechanisms for negotiating contexts and </p><p>making choices. Further evidence for this prediction comes from the behavioral al- </p><p>terations observed in illness and after injury. Both clinical and scientific evidence </p><p>suggest that decision signals are carried by electrical neuronal activity and influenced </p><p>by neuromodulatory chemicals. This dissertation addresses the function of two puta- </p><p>tive contributors to decision-making: neuronal activity in posterior cingulate cortex </p><p>and modulatory effects of serotonin. I found that posterior cingulate neurons respond </p><p>phasically to salient events (informative cues; intentional saccades; and reward deliv- </p><p>ery) across multiple contexts. In addition, these neurons signal heuristically guided </p><p>choices across contexts in a gambling task. These observations suggest that posterior </p><p>cingulate neurons contribute to the detection and integration of salient information </p><p>necessary to transform event detection to expressed decisions. I also found that </p><p>lowering levels of the neuromodulator serotonin increased the probability of making </p><p>risky decisions in both monkeys and mice, suggesting that this neurotransmitter con- </p><p>tributes to preference formation across species. These results suggest that posterior </p><p>cingulate cortex and serotonin each contribute to decision formation. In addition, the </p><p>unique serotonergic pro jections to posterior cingulate cortex, as well as the frequent </p><p>implication of altered serotonergic and posterior cingulate function in psychiatric dis- </p><p>orders, suggest that the confluence of cingulate and serotonergic activity may offer </p><p>key insights into normal and pathological mechanisms of decision making.</p> / Dissertation

Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of salience on the comprehension of predictive inferences in adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI), by increasing the visual salience of the predictive sentence. This study also investigated whether a relationship existed between performance on a predictive inferencing comprehension task and working memory for this population. Increasing the salience of a crucial sentence in the predictive inferencing task may lead to better memory for the inferred information within the focused portion of the text (Gernsbacher & Jescheniak, 1995; Parkhurst, Law, & Niebur, 2002). Method: Six participants with TBI and six non-brain injured peers (NBI) took part in the study. Each participant was administered an inference comprehension task which consisted of a series of 55 stories. Each story incorporated one of five conditions: 1) a Recent salient condition (inferred information immediately preceded the comprehension question and was visually salient); 2) a Recent non-salient condition (inferred information immediately preceded the comprehension question but was not visually salient); 3) a Distant salient condition (inferred information occurred early in the story and was visually salient); 4) a Distant non-salient condition (inferred information occurred early in the story and was not visually salient); and 5) a Control condition (no inferred information in the story). In addition there were 20 filler stories. The predictive sentence was bolded in half the stories in order to increase the visual salience of the stimuli. In addition, a measure of working memory span (Lehman-Blake & Tompkins, 2001) was administered. Results: A significant main effect was found for Group, F(1,11) = 7.6, p= 0.019, with adults with TBI performing more poorly than matched controls. A significant main effect was also found for Condition, F(3,33) = 3.159, p = 0.038, with all participants performing more poorly in the Distant non-salient condition. No statistically significant interaction between Group x Condition was observed, F(3,33) = 0.469, p =0.706. Post-hoc comparisons revealed that all participants performed more poorly in the non-salient condition when the storage load was high (distant non-salient condition). Significant correlations were found for working memory span and the Distant salient condition (r =0.677, p < 0.05) and Distant non-salient condition (r = 0.646, p < 0.05). Conclusion: The results have both theoretical and clinical implications. Theoretically, the role of attention in working memory is of interest in language comprehension (e.g. Montgomery, Evans, & Gillam, 2009). This study may further contribute to studies of allocation of attention using increased salience to enhance comprehension. Clinically, the use of enhancing the salience of key information is a practical strategy that can be employed.

The focus of this thesis is to explore the impact of positive affective state and mood salience on intertemporal decision making. We found that positive affect significantly influence intertemporal preference. We also found that when current mood becomes salient to the decision maker, the direction of preference changes. Specifically, we hypothesized and found that individuals with positive mood are more likely to choose the later larger (long term) rewards than the individuals with a neutral mood. We discuss three factors that could explain choice behaviour in such situations. These factors are the willingness to maintain positive mood, temporal orientation and risk perception, and increase in the level of dopamine in brain. Moreover, our results indicate that when current positive mood is salient, individuals become more concerned about their affective state, and are more likely to engage in affect regulation, and as a result, more likely to prefer the sooner smaller (immediate) rewards. These findings suggest that experiencing positive affect would increase patience and self-control. However, this is the case when the level of mood salience is not high. When individuals’ attention is directed to their emotional states, they tend to choose sooner smaller rewards that could assist them in keeping their good mood and avoiding negative feelings.

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT, Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff, 1983, 1987, 1993, 2008, 2009), the most prominent cognitive approach to metaphor comprehension, argues that the nature of interconnections within the conceptual system is inherently metaphoric-analogical and that systematic patterns in linguistic metaphor reveal these cognitive interconnections. Relevance Theory (RT, Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Wilson & Sperber, 1993; Sperber & Wilson, 1995; Wilson & Sperber, 2002, 2004) and Graded Salience (GS, Giora, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003; Peleg et al., 2008; Peleg & Giora, 2011) disagree that systematic patterns in linguistic metaphor can be taken as direct evidence of their cognitive representation. A metaphor consists of two concepts, a source and a target concept. The metaphor implies an analogy between the two concepts. To comprehend a metaphor is to infer under which conditions the implied analogy holds. The meaning of the two concepts is pragmatically enriched by these additional assumptions. Metaphor comprehension is an inferential process. The result of this process is the enriched meaning of the metaphor. This meaning can become conventionalised, in which case it often serves as an inferential shortcut: instead of having to consider all conceptually possible interpretations and their plausibility in the context of the analogy, speakers who are familiar with the conventional (i.e. idiomatic) meaning are provided with a default interpretation. According to CMT, the inferential process is a process of interconnecting primary embodied concepts to ever more complex higher-order concepts. On this view, a metaphoric idiomatic meaning is such a complex concept where the conceptual interconnections are conventional. According to RT, the inferential process is a process of inferring a meaning that is in line with the speaker's communicative intent, the discourse context, and interlocutors' expectations of the cognitive relevance of potential inferences. On this view, metaphoric idiomatic meanings are highly salient inferences with a high degree of contextual relevance because speakers' expectations of relevance are conventionalised. According to GS, the inferential process consists of two modules that work in parallel: a module that infers salient meanings based on linguistic knowledge and a module that enriches the meaning by taking non-linguistic knowledge such as conceptual, experiential, perceptual, contextual, and world knowledge into consideration. On this view, metaphoric idiomatic meanings are highly salient inferences because of speakers' knowledge of non-conceptual linguistic conventions. This thesis investigates the claims made by CMT, RT and GS by experimentally testing the cross-linguistic communicability of metaphoric proverbs with idiomatic meanings. Proverbs are selected such that the similarity of metaphors' source and target concepts, expectations of contextual relevance, and the degree of familiarity with proverbs' conventional wording is cross-linguistically maximised. If CMT is correct, then when cross-linguistic conceptual similarity is maximised in this way, monolingual native speakers should find L2 language-specific metaphors communicable. If RT and GS are correct, then monolingual native speakers should find L2-specific metaphors less communicable than L1-specific and non-language-specific metaphoric proverbs because they lack knowledge of the necessary non-conceptual linguistic conventions. Cross-linguistic metaphor communicability is measured in three ways in the experiments: (1) through reading/response times, (2) through plausibility judgements, and (3) through a context creation task. Results show that cross-linguistic metaphor communicability of L2-specific metaphors is lowered for monolingual native speakers on all three measures.